A Darkness Of No Return - 90%

Heavy as the deepest winter chill, the kind of chill that cracks the bones, Heavydeath are aptly named and properly aesthetically envisioned. Sarcophagus In The Sky is an album of dark midwinter hunting, spear-in-hand, waist-deep in snow, while silently invoking primitive gods to intercede on behalf of your survival. Less a continuation of Runemagick's esoteric death metal distillations (from whose ashes Heavydeath arose) than a complete devolution of that sound, reduced to the ashes of the most brutish form of proto death-doom imaginable.

The sound on this album is mammoth, immense, capacious, and heavy in a way that isn't over-reliant on fancy production or increased distortion to hit those bowel-rumbling open chords of earth shaking malignancy. The vibe is loose and feral while the execution is focused and intense. There is nothing fancy about this release. It is as proto as proto death-doom can get and as far removed from stoner grooves or '70's fashion sense as you can possible get. Immersive and mesmerizing without being repetitive or banal, Heavydeath represent pure tribal gathering style doom, the hypnosis of the great bonfire celebration after having defeated your enemies in battle.

Shoring up this analogy are the exhortative vocals, like a berzerker witch doctor goading his hordes into ritualistic frenzies of Chaos god worship beneath the blood moon. It is a heavy trip of heavy death that sounds almost alien to our post-modern ears, though as our civilizations continue to totter and collapse, the well from which Heavydeath has tapped will rekindle within our most primal, subsumed senses.